How my little brother destroyed my chances for olympic gymnastics greatness...
Back when I was a wee little biochem_ninja, around 8 years old, my younger brother and I bitched and whinged to our parents to let us start doing gymnastics, as a family friend's son had recently started. They agreed, and off we trotted in our little camp 90s leotards.

Now my brother has always been a bit cack-handed and accident prone, he's jumped in swimming pools facing backwards, smashing his forehead open on the side (2 teatowels worth of blood that time...) and been hit in the nose with the full force of a golf club backswing, amongst other gory escapades. Bringing him and a highly dynamic, physically demanding and skilful sport together would always be a recipe for disaster...

So anywaaay, we'd must have only attended this gymnastics class for 3 months or so, when the inevitable happened.

We were in a group with about 4 others, queueing (queuing? I don't know. That word makes less and less sense as I look at it for longer and longer) for our go on the asymmetric bars (You know, the ones the starving 15 year-old Romanian girls do in the olympics?). I was behind my brother, so I saw the whole event unfold. He was lifted up onto the lower bar by the coach, told to swing a few times, then jump to the higher bar. I heard him muttering "1...2...3..." then he jumped.

Now, the coach had chosen this point to turn around to talk to some randomer about the weather, or discuss the pattern on her coffee mug, or discuss the political situation in Madagascar.

She therefore failed to catch my brother as he reached out for the higher bar, and slipped.

She also failed to catch him as he fell towards the crash-mat.

She only actually turned around from her conversation when she heard the sickening crunch as my brother landed on the mat. They thought that perhaps he’d broken part of the equipment, so they began checking the apparatus.

It took them about 30 seconds to realise my brother hadn’t got up, and he was looking rather pale. On closer inspection the female coach almost fainted… My brother landing on the crash mat with his arm behind his back had meant that the pressure of his bodyweight had splintered his elbow into roughly 40 pieces. It was mess. No blood on the outside, but, plenty in places it shouldn’t be, under the skin…The paramedics arrived about 15 minutes later, took one look at the limb that was now held together by only skin and muscle tissue, and stuffed my brother in the back of an ambulance. My brother didn't scream once, he passed out with the pain, poor sod.

All I remember from that afternoon was the ride home with a family friend, following the ambulance to the hospital. My brother had to have a total 12 pints of blood transfused during the surgery that reconstructed his elbow (the human body only contains 8 or so pints, so quite a fair bit of blood involved), staples, and about a total of 30 stitches.

The bottom line? £13,000 compensation from the club due to the lack of attention from the coach, a big scar and an arm he can't straighten to tell cool stories with, and a lot of love and attention from worried parents and friends for my little brother.

And for me? Our parents banned us from gymnastics, scuppering my chances of gymnastic stardom on the world-stage.

Cheers bro. You selfish git.

(apologies for the lengthy pop!)
(the_biochem_ninja can resist everything except temptation, Tue 12 Aug 2008, 10:33, 1 reply)

Ouchie
Joints are the worse things to break :(

If you are interested, generally "Queuing" is the preferred spelling however I do believe there is some crazy theory that is spelt "Queueing" dealing with how people queue..

I may have to confer with Wiki...
( TGB checking Off Topic is still shit at, Tue 12 Aug 2008, 12:41, closed)